Building Out Blog Submissions and Workflows via Flow

[Anonymous]

Hi Everyone,

I have a question about setting up a Flow and am hoping the community can help me out. I'd like to use Flow to field submissions for a blog and then manage the approval workflows. 

I'd imagine the steps to go as followed:

- Blog Submitted via MS Forms or Document Uploaded to Sharepoint Folder

- The submission, let's say it's a Word doc, is then reviewed by a series of stakeholders, and each review hands off to the next. Let's call them Reviewer A, Review B and Reviewer C. 

In your opinion, what is the most ideal way to build this out?

Thanks!

[v-yamao-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Do you want to send approval email to multiple approvers when a file is uploaded to SharePoint folder?

I have set up the flow likes below for your reference.

Add the trigger When a file is created (properties only).

Add action Start and wait for an approval to Reviewer A.

Add a Condition to check if the Response is equal to Approve, if yes, start another approval action to Reviewer B.

The same configuration with Reviewer C.

Please take it for a reference and try it on your side.

Best regards,

Mabel

[MarkStokes]

As mentioned above, you can stack your approvals in nested if statements, which might be better so that you can add feedback and actions if one of the reviewers declines it. More simply you can use a single Approval action configured to get approval one after the other.

Now, from a solution design perspective MS Forms is an obvious choice for submission but in this case there is one huge drawback. Users can only submit raw text. Not styling, bold, italics, marquees, images, tables, etc. All that flashy rich text stuff that people like in blogs.

So, for the approval, you might be better directing them to a SharePoint list form where they have Add rights. This depends if you want them seeing other people’s. If it’s not a HUGE issue, just make the default view so they only see their own submissions. If they are savvy then they can change the view to see others, but you can decide if that’s really an issue or not.

Otherwise you can create a very simple PowerApp to take the submission. This would literally be a days effort.

Or, you could get them to submit a Word document, as you suggested, but this just feels a little, you know, old skool. And you have the same issues as the list item on them seeing other peoples submissions.

- Mark

[Anonymous]

Thanks! I appreciate the response!

I think we may go the Sharepoint folder route. I have one more question for you though. If the reviewer in any of these stages in going to make updates to the document, how would they approve the document after it has been updated?

For example, let's say John is the second reviewer and is tasked with reviewing for SEO. He'd get a notification that he's now up to review the SEO, and would then go into the Sharepoint File to review the document, and make his updates. How would he notify the third user that he has completed SEO review and it's is now the third reviewer's responsibility to review the document? 

[Anonymous]

Thanks Mark. Appreciate the quick reply. We'll probably go with Sharepoint and having users upload a document to a folder, which would then trigger the reviews since MS Forms seems limited. 

[MarkStokes]

No problems.

So, in this scenario there is a bit of a training exercise.

They don't hit Approve until they are done.  If you use an Approval task then they can also enter notes which could be extracted and passed on to the next approver.

An alternative is to use a Send Email with Options Action where you could present more buttons than just Approve / Decline, but you will lose the ability to add comments.

Another Alternatively... you could link the approvers to the documents in Teams and they could use the Conversations feature against the document in Teams to leave friendly messages for the next approvers in the chain. Just a thought.

When creating your Flow trigger you want to make sure you only trigger on Document CREATED not modified. Otherwise a new instance of the Flow will trigger each time someone makes an update. 

- Mark

[Anonymous]

Thanks Mark. 

I'm guessing they'd get the notification for the approval. Use that to know they know they need to work on a document, make their updates, and then go into the initial email and hit approve?

Or is there an actual button / integration within Word Online where they can check something as approved?

Also it seems like it'll be easier to keep the comments within the Word doc vs having it be included in Teams.

[MarkStokes]

Correct.

I am not aware of any aproval buttons right inside word. That would be nice.

- Mark

[Anonymous]

Alright I'll test it out and get back to you guys! Appreciate the help.